Tech

When The New York Times reported the popular inbox-cleaning app Unroll.me was providing anonymized user data to Uber as part of the ride-hailing company's bid to crush competition from Lyft, the backlash was swift.

Outraged users took to Twitter, bashing the company and pledging to delete the service. CEO Jojo Hedaya quickly apologized, but it did little to quell the outrage. Later, Unroll.me cofounder Perri Chase wrote an impassioned defense of Hedaya on Medium.

"Data is pretty much the only business model for email and Unroll.me is not the only company that looks at, collects and sells your data," Chase — who is no longer part of the company — wrote. "There was no intentional malice done by Jojo or anyone at Unroll.me."

Outside of Silicon Valley, distrust of tech companies runs deep.

That may be the case, but her remarkably tone-deaf defense ignores the bigger issue: outside of Silicon Valley, distrust of tech companies runs deep, and incidents like this only reinforce those misgivings.

People still think Facebook's app is listening to their conversations in order to show them more relevant ads, even though the company has denied it for years. Before that, people accused Facebook Messenger of eavesdropping, too.

It's easy to write these concerns off as the paranoid ramblings of conspiracy theorists, but the Unroll.me debacle proves exactly why the public is so mistrustful of tech companies.

Furthermore, that Chase and other technocrats are so dismissive of these concerns only makes the problem worse. "If you think this is the worst thing that tech companies do with your data then you have your head in the sand," Chase wrote.

That's not only condescending AF, it's exactly the wrong attitude to have when it comes to user privacy. The assumption is that because data collection is a "normal" business practice, companies only have a minimal obligation to disclose it to their users.

When in reality the problem is not that Unroll.me was scraping data from users' inboxes and selling it (in anonymized form) to third parties, but the lack of transparency that this was happening. The company's entire business model is predicated on data collection but nowhere on the company's app, website, sign-up page, or anywhere else was that made clear. (Hedaya has said he plans to address this.)

Even if you took the time to read their privacy policy — and, let's be real, no one does — it doesn't explicitly spell this out. "We may collect and use your commercial transactional messages and associated data to build anonymous market research products and services with trusted business partners," it says. But in no way does it make clear that Unroll.me is literally in the business of selling data.

That's why promising to do better isn't enough. Users have a right to know exactly how and when their data is being used. And it's up to tech companies to make that clear — not bury it in privacy policies no one reads.

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